Inferno - Max Hastings [381]
Hungarian communists pleaded with the Soviet command to restrain its soldiers. “It is no good praising the Red Army on posters, in the Party, in the factories and everywhere,” declared one such bitter appeal late in February, “if men who have survived the tyranny are now herded along the roads like cattle by Russian soldiers, constantly leaving dead bodies behind. Comrades sent to the country to promote land distribution are being asked by the peasants what use the land is to them if their horses have been taken from the meadows by Russians. They cannot plough with their noses.” Such representations were vain. Stalin decreed that pillage and rape were the rightful rewards of his soldiers for their sacrifices. Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and Hungarians alike suffered the fate that would soon fall upon Germans.
In Budapest, even before the final collapse of the defence, the city’s first cinema reopened with a showing of the Soviet propaganda film The Battle of Orel. Work began almost immediately on erecting statues of Soviet war heroes in public spaces. After enduring extremities of suffering, Hungarians yearned to laugh again, and cabarets were soon doing brisk business amid the rubble. The comedian Kálmán Latabár walked on stage to a standing ovation which became ecstatic when he pulled up his sleeves and trouser leg to reveal rows of watches, mocking Hungary’s Soviet “liberators.” A few months later, he would have been shot for less.
The capture of Budapest cost the Russians around 80,000 dead and a quarter of a million wounded. Some 38,000 civilians died in the siege; tens of thousands more were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labour, from which many never returned. The German and Hungarian forces lost about 40,000 dead and 63,000 men taken prisoner. This savage, futile battle would have been accounted an epic had it taken place on the Anglo-American front. As it was, only the Hungarians took much notice of its horrors, then or later. Within three months it was eclipsed by a matching drama, on a much larger scale, in Hitler’s own capital.
2. Eisenhower’s Advance to the Elbe
IN THE FIRST MONTHS of 1945, most Germans greeted the arrival of American and British forces in their country as an undeserved intrusion; if many understood that Hitler had led them to disaster, they nonetheless found it hard to accept the implications for their own domestic lives. Men of the U.S. 273rd Field Artillery occupied a house inhabited, in the words of one of its soldiers, by “a small, bird-like woman dressed in black, who tottered out from a side door. As soon as she saw us plundering her woodpile, she started hollering in German. As we carried away armfuls, she burst into tears and wailed uncontrollably, choking on half-sentences.” The Americans debated before dismissing their own scruples. “ ‘Hell,’ said Frenchie, ‘she’s just as German as all the rest of the krauts.’ ” Likewise a hillbilly in Pfc. Charles Felix’s unit, when a voluble German woman complained bitterly that the GI intruders were scratching the furniture in her house. “I’ve had enough of these goddamn krauts!” expostulated the soldier. “We’re over here fighting because of them and she’s got the nerve to complain about her furniture! Here, lady, I’ll show you some goddamn damage!” He seized a chair and threw it at the wall. Only a minority of Allied soldiers preserved lingering inhibitions towards civilians: a soldier in Aaron Larkin’s engineer platoon burst into tears when ordered to evict a German family from their house to make way for his unit; Pfc. Harold Lindstrom suffered an instinctive pang of guilt when he lay down on a woman’s feather bed in full infantry kit and boots.
The U.S. Army’s judge advocate general recorded a steep increase in incidents of rape once Allied soldiers entered German territory: “We were members